Ranking the Strippers at Jumbo’s Clown Room

GONZO

By how much I’d pay to f*ck them

By Worst Boyfriend Ever · September 25, 2026 · 12 min read

The LA Times just declared Jumbo’s Clown Room “one of L.A.’s hottest creative writing scenes.” Yes, the LA paper of record sent a reporter into East Hollywood to inform us that the girls swinging off the poles aren’t just dancing whores—they’re memoirists, playwrights, novelists. They’re clacking out epic poems on 1951 typewriters; they’re “meaning to crack open the Marcel Proust canon”; they’re breaking free of the dreaded male gaze. Tired of misogynist auteurs like Bukowski, Tarantino, and Lynch mining them for “impressions,” they’re ready to tell their own stories.

For example, stripper Danielle Henderson tells her story under the pen name D.M. Faulk; she’s working on a sci-fi novel about “a dystopian American wasteland where pregnant women are surveilled and controlled.” How did she think of such an original and groundbreaking premise? The Times reports that it was inspired by “conversations between dancers about reproductive rights” following the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. Elsewhere in the piece, another dancer describes her prized “1951 Olympia typewriter” as “my child.” The one she can’t abort.

The girl serving as my de facto “girlfriend” for the month sent me the article, knowing it would rile me up. I thought: God, we’ve got enough of the whores LARPing as intellectuals online—flashing ass while crying. Take me seriously! Take me seriously! And now we’ve gotta pretend at the fucking strip club? A man’s last vestige of honest intersexual relations? Bukowski rolls in his grave.

I had to see it for myself. I could not resist this opportunity to brush elbows with these Tolstoys of tomorrow, these Faulkners of the future. It was also my last night in LA, and she had demanded that we do something “fun” together, so we got drunk and took a Waymo to investigate the scene.

Jumbo’s Clown Room is a gay strip club. Not literally, like there aren’t male dancers, but it’s explicit from the big sign on the door: “NO TOUCHING.” Half the value for me is getting to grab these girls’ flesh in the process of tucking bills into their waistbands. Seeing just how far I can go before they start to get antsy. None of that here. No lap dances either. You just sit and you watch and you pay. To give you an idea of the “vibe,” one of the dancers, after her set, actually leaned down to give a male patron a high five.

We arrived around 10. I walked up to the bartender.

“Two blowjobs, please.”

She looked at me like I said the word nigger forty times out loud. Like I was speaking Swahili. You’re a bartender. At a strip club. How are you not familiar with the drink referred to as a “blowjob”? She was; she just didn’t like my straight white male energy. Audrey paid for them because I don’t have a debit card and this place doesn’t take “Apple Pay,” which is the second bar in this city I’ve seen handicap themselves in this way. We drank them quickly. After a few moments, she told me, “You know those were twenty bucks each?” and I laughed. Of course they were. Whatever it takes to support the work of the finest literary minds in LA.

Anyway, here’s my ranking of every stripper I saw there by how much I’d pay to fuck them:

6. Honey

Used up, like Britney Spears post-breakdown. She was covered head to toe in tats, the most striking of which was an electrical socket on her lower back. Plug in here. But even I, a completely deranged sex addict with extremely low standards, did not want to plug in anywhere near her.

Either she had been doing this for too long, or she had just recently started and was too nervous to have fun with it. Her smile, her laugh, her whole affect was so put-on. I felt pity instead of arousal. And I was watching these girls intensely, leaning into the experience, trying to be aroused. She seemed intent on repeating this slithering scorpion move, which culminated in a triumphant gymnastic bridge. It wasn’t sexy at all. Look—as a stripper, you either need tits or ass. And she had neither. Just a palpable sense of despair and a slight case of scoliosis.

Audrey said this girl was her favorite, which blew me away until I remembered that she doesn’t have a dick, and so her input was totally irrelevant and likely inversely proportional to strippers’ actual value.

To fuck her, I wouldn’t pay much. $24.99 tops.

5. Ivy

Black, so time for a bathroom break. But then she kept coming back, over and over, to bigger rounds of applause and showerings of bills that felt like reparations. She had a face for radio, vaguely bovine. I think she scared my date. Audrey and I were having a little spat about how much longer we “needed to be here,” and Ivy interrupted us mid-dance with a cute little “Hii”—she was at least present in the room.

I’ll give her that: she was frequently smiling, despite her status as the least attractive woman at Jumbo’s Clown Room, including the bartenders and every female patron in the crowd. I salute her for her tenacity and generally positive attitude. Without fail, she reappeared every 15–20 minutes, like the errant chirp of a broken smoke alarm.

I have never fucked a black girl, not once in my entire life—not because I’m racist, but because I’m thin and sensitive and somewhat afraid of AIDS. And there’s the harrowing possibility I wouldn’t be packing enough to satisfy her. How could I compare to her uncle Devonte? Wait, I know how that sounds; it’s not a race thing, I swear. Look, at least she’s not last on my list. I’d take her over Honey.

At the risk of sounding like a Southern auctioneer, I’ll estimate her total value at $30.

4. Danielle

Fat. It was sad. She got fewer tips than the other girls. We could see and feel the free market play out in real time. She wasn’t that much fatter than the next-largest girl, but enough so that I mentally categorized her as “the fat one” and seriously grappled with the prospect of how I would handle a girl of her size.

But she also had a bright smile, and her body did do something to me.

“Are you into the cat thing?” Audrey asked.

“What? Oh, she’s wearing leopard print. Didn’t notice. Wasn’t looking at her clothes.”

She looked like one of those girls who goes retarded when you fuck her. Eyes rolled back, speaking in tongues, just enough pageantry to distract you from the jiggling mounds of flesh and the sweat between the folds that might otherwise take you out of the sad moment. The kind of girl you might settle for because the bar was closing and she’s visibly drunk. Still, even the allure of attainability has its limits.

I could not help but wonder, how do you not just lose weight? You would make so much more. You’re doing cardio on this pole every fucking night anyway. How could you do this to yourself, Danielle?

I wish her well and urge her to look into Chinese peptides. Until then, I wouldn’t pay more than $45.

3. Lux

Obviously Jewish. A personal favorite of my friend Allen, known on Substack as “Thailand Strip Club Reviewer,” who arrived around midnight. Allen skipped the hour-long line outside by convincing the bouncer he “really needed to pee,” but the bouncer took his ID and said he had to come back out and get it soon. Lux was captivating enough that Allen didn’t want to leave and retrieve it.

“Just stay, man. It’ll be fine,” I told him. “They’ll give it back to you on the way out.”

So he remained, taking in Lux’s tall, well-built body and severe expression. She seemed like she could give a tough handjob.

She did not smile once in the four times she took the stage. But, unlike the previous three girls, she was not fat, not black, and not used up, tatted, or withered beyond repair. What she lacked in feminine charm, she made up for in confidence, poise, and the fact that she had clearly spent most of her life building her body for the viewing pleasure of men. I wonder if it cuts into her writing time, the thousands of pull-ups and squats. She was almost scary. I got the sense that if we had sex, I wouldn’t have to undergo the arduous process of performing a “rape” on her, that, more realistically, she’d be raping me.

And for that experience, I’d pay about $60.

2. Delilah

Big but hot. A sexy librarian type. She moved slowly, gracefully, and also, I have a thing for glasses. She was hypnotic; she crawled right up to the patrons and teased them to the fullest extent this gay establishment would allow.

By now, the bartender, who pretended not to know what a blowjob was, had started squawking at me for leaning against the bar and putting my drink on the wrong type of coaster. This nagging recurred every few minutes until they just accepted I have a weak back and was completely entranced by Delilah’s performance.

She was talented. We held eye contact for several seconds at a time. She looked at me as if knowing I would write about her and that I should. She was built for the male gaze. A clown still, but at least a clown muse.

At a typical strip club, there’s this natural balance of power—the women take your money, and you get to treat them like a piece of meat, humble them, objectify them, appropriate their pure dollar value. At Jumbo’s, it felt like most of the patrons there, socialite yuppies in their late 20s, were not really watching the dancers but watching themselves, making sure to treat women with the utmost respect, participating in the wider performance of being an empathetic and deferential patron.

I blew the last of my singles on her. I also made Audrey stay for one more dance so I could see her again. I’d estimate her value at about half the value of a common Japanese streetwalker, so around $90.

1. Valentina

Mexican or Middle Eastern. At first, we weren’t sure, but then we saw her move and agreed she was definitely Mexican. Perfect ass, like a nice fat rectangular UPS package. Obviously real, obviously soft. There was death in her eyes, but nobody was looking at them, so it didn’t matter.

Somebody near the stage yelled, “Are you Mexican!?” and she just didn’t respond. She dropped onto the floor and flexed her glute muscles, one at a time, so as to bounce along with the music. I felt something in my pants for the first time that night. She came out with a black cowboy hat and placed it ever so gingerly on a patron’s head. I wished it were me. Congratulations, Valentina, if you’re reading this, I dub you the most valuable whore. I’m sure your poetry’s great too.

This was the one I closed my eyes picturing as I fucked Audrey sideways the next morning. Specifically, that flexing move on the floor. She’s got a good few years left before Torta Death at 34, and to creampie her, I would be willing to part with a whopping $150.

0. Audrey

Audrey wouldn’t care or be jealous to read the above paragraph. She told me, “I was getting turned on watching you watch those girls last night,” and I smiled, remembering that all women are cucks.

“Where would I rank among those girls?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t rank you among them unless you were up there on stage dancing,” I replied.

I suppose this is what bothered me about the whole thing. The LA Times wanted me to see these women as artists, intellectuals, but my body knows better. Even Audrey, a law student, the only woman there who I’m sure actually writes, knows where her true value lies. And now that I think about it—I spent more on her than I would to fuck any of those whores anyway.

I gave Jumbo’s Clown Room a one-star review on Google. Not even for all the gay shit, for something much more petty. Near closing time, my group decided to pack it in and go retrieve Allen’s ID from the bouncer outside. Unfortunately, the bouncer was Mexican, and short, and difficult, and seemed to have a real chip on his shoulder, relishing this opportunity to mildly inconvenience my friend.

“Just pretend to be retarded, like Shane Gillis,” I told him. “They’ll give you your ID back.”

So he did, but it didn’t work.

“Sorry, sir, we have to hold it. You come back tomorrow.”

“Why? It’s right there inside. It’s an ID. You’re holding it hostage. Can you just give it to me, please?” he begged.

“Sorry, sir, there’s nothing I can do. We open at eight tomorrow.”

Allen lives across LA, which, in my estimation, must be the shittiest place to drive in the whole country, so instead of “coming back tomorrow,” he opted instead to pay $37 to get a replacement ID at the DMV. Yes, the DMV. That’s where he’d rather spend his time than ever return to Jumbo’s Clown Room.